


(dis)comfort

by x (ordinary)



Series: A Litany of Darkened Sparks [2]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Surreal, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-24 19:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20912987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: She knows-- in a distant way, afloatingway, a cloud dissipating intonothingway-- that this is just the precursor. It is the before.It does not compare to the after.The after hits like a bomb.





	(dis)comfort

**Author's Note:**

> AHHH I ACCIDENTALLY POSTED THIS EARLY SORRY IT'S HERE FOR REAL NOW
> 
> a veeery overdue prompt fill from drmadisonli on tumblr. phew! it ended up being a bit of a companion piece to (un)tethered, so i stuck them together in a loose series in case another prompt grows some legs.

The fabric of the dream is a shallow sea of ether and churning pitch stitched together by the staggering and desolate promise of eternity. She sits in it, shoulders hunched and head dropped, staring down with unseeing eyes at oblivion.

She is a pig in mud, a branch in quicksand, the _lump _in your _throat_ when you need to cry but the tears just don’t come. She is stuck. It’s so hard to move. The inevitability of ceased perpetual motion approaches its event horizon, every atom slowing. Here, nothing vibrates. Here, nothing moves.

It is stasis. 

Her eyes fall shut, fragments of her soul sliding out from their corners. They crackle as they track down her cheeks, leaving behind wounds that do not hurt, that do not bleed. They spread across her skin like branching trees, tracing the veins and capillaries of her arms, her legs, and the sea that is not a sea rises from its placid surface, climbing up the gouges. 

It is too thick to be water and too cold to be blood, and its weight is heavy and unyielding. The infection becomes her, the poison is more than skin deep. It leeches the marrow from her bones until she is carved out and hollow. The emptiness is unbearable. 

She is a forgotten thing, abandoned and dusty, but none of this is a surprise. This place-- this unhallowed place, this space between sorrow and grief, this space that has hunted her with the keen nose of a predator hot on the tail of something fearful-- has left a mark upon her mind. 

After all, these are well worn treads of suffering, ones repeated ad nauseam. A clockwork affair. 

It would be a nightmare, she thinks, to anyone else. Instead, it is _stasis, _and that’s safe, despite the pain. Nothing thrusts her forward, nothing _catapults_ her into what she cannot handle. 

Because of that, she knows-- in a distant way, a _floating _way, a cloud dissipating into _nothing _way-- that this is just the precursor. It is the before. 

It does not compare to the after.

The after hits like a bomb.

Wakefulness winds its way around her neck tighter than any noose, and the scream in her throat dies like a dead animal made paste by a moving vehicle, stopped short in its tracks. Obliterated. disintegrated. Unrecognizable.

The air in her throat is too cold and too sharp. She does not know where she is.

A bone-deep shudder washes through her frozen body, it is immobilized from head to toe. Her limbs are not bound by cloth nor chain, but she can’t budge, can’t even curl a finger. Can hardly breathe, and inside, she weeps.

Again.

Again, again, _again_. 

This always happens, after that dream. This loss of control. Her body is pinned beneath the oppressive shadow that is the night, covering her prone form entirely. It holds her here, like this, until she can _see_.

A figure lingers in the corner of her eye, a vision in the dark, dark room. It stays just out of reach, incorporeal and soon to vanish. His smile is too kind, wispy like his beard, and the moonlight does not reach the surface of his glasses. 

_Papa_, Natalie thinks, her hand shaking as she is freed from paralysis in time to extend it, and he vanishes like sand in the wind just in time for her to sob. It is loud and it is ugly, the grief inside her gathering until it is a relentless storm. He’s been gone for a year now and she still feels lost, a little girl who has lost her world. Who is lost _in_ the world.

She curls up against herself with every muscle tensed, shaking as she wants to go back to that terrible place of her dreams. She can be miserable in _peace_, there, where she never has to try and cut through the agony that is life without her father with nothing but a rusty knife and willpower.

Moving forwards is painful, like eating fistfuls of glass in bitterness and anger. One bite after another, swallowing down the thousand cuts that shred her into ribbons.

When she takes a bite of his favorite food. When she is alone in the workshop without his gentle humming along to **[Berlioz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2Kky5BC9Uk) **beneath his breath. When she drops a tool and waits to be gently chastised for a moment of clumsiness. When she sees the sunrise and wants to fetch him to see it, too.

Wave after wave come the things can never be, and bile rises in Natalie’s throat as she is once more brought to her knees by the knowledge that this ache will never cease. It lessens, she knows. It lessens with time. But a year is not long enough, and she has to carry on, to pull the weight of her mourning onto her back and haul it forwards, and to find the power to do it comes from an ugly well of fury that burbles inside of her like molten lava. 

Fury that he _left_ her. 

Fury that he was _taken_ from her.

Fury that all she has left is memories and letters, some holovids and keepsakes. Mere fragments of his life well lived.

Most of all, though, is the fury that she turns it inwards, a flurry of daggers pressing one by one between her ribs. He taught her to be better than this, so _weak. _Weak not because of her sorrow, no, but because she is a coward. Natalie aches to retreat back into numb and nothing because it’s easier than this burden to _bear--_

A cool, small hand lays itself on Natalie’s back, resting between her shoulder blades. Wraith does not speak, does not breathe a word about the way Natalie’s sobbing is ragged and huge, too big for her body. Does not come with the token condolences of others with _it'll be okay_ and _you'll be fine_. The thought of it reduces her into dust. She is _not_ fine, and she may never be fine again. She is no longer the girl she was before her father died: her chemical composition has altered, her DNA rewritten. The enormity of death-- true death, permanent death, not the death she wields and receives in the safety of an arena nigh hand-designed-- is beyond the scope of comprehension. 

She can't explain how she _knows_ it's true, can't give words to the concept in either languages she knows.

Wraith doesn't ask her to.

Instead, she makes herself an anchor, a quiet port in the storm of Natalie's grief, rubbing her hand in wide circles with a touch that shifts from hesitant to firm. It's slow and rhythmic, and carefully, she is pulled in close, reeled in until her shaking body is clutched by another. Time loses meaning in the dark, and her sense of self dissolves inside of it, too. These nights peel back her skin to reveal someone smaller, someone insignificant, unimportant. She is not Wattson here; the self-assurance she wears is easier to find the foothold for in the day. She is hardly even _Natalie_ here. Natalie is rubble, scorched ash, decaying bones. 

"Hey," Wraith finally murmurs, when her sobs have slowed enough to have heartbeats between them, "come back to me." Natalie twists in their clammy sheets, unable to meet pale eyes, instead immediately burying her face into Wraith's bare chest, wrapping both of her arms around her with a grip too tight. 

"_Non_," she mumbles against cool skin, gulping in huge, shuddering breaths. The scent of her soap (sharp) and shampoo (borrowed, fruity) and skin (clean) cloud her senses, and against her ear beats the drum of a slow and steady pulse. The rise and fall of Wraith's chest are soft, even. She is here, she is here. Lips brush the crown of her head, and calloused fingers run through her sweat-slick hair. A silent guardian in the wake of grief.

"_Il me manque,_" she whispers, skin-muffled and ugly, hoarse from the force of her weeping. "All the time, all the _time_\--" Her nails dig like spikes into Wraith's shoulder blades, and the entirety of her shakes with the force of shifting tectonic plates. Wraith weathers this, too, with only a hitched breath that is the recognition of pain. She does not shy away. Instead, her touch is everywhere; skimming freckled shoulders and behind the curve of ears. She's so calm, and for a moment Natalie desperately wants to crawl inside her skin, to seek shelter in it, to selfishly clad herself in battle-hardened and trauma-tested armor that is not her own.

Through a haze of clouds, Solace's moon is just bright enough to cast them in soft, muted blues, raising the shroud of darkness enough to see the outline of furniture in her quarters. It takes away from the ephemeral vastness that comes with the dark, pulls back the veil to reveal the banal. The corner where she'd seen the murky vision of her father is empty and bare. 

Wraith cups her jaw slowly, tilting Natalie's head upwards where it rests against her breasts. Her eyes glitter in the dim, giving off their trademark glow. In them is concern, a searching sort that darts across her features. Natalie knows what she sees-- Puffy, swollen eyes, still leaking. Flushed face still wet. A lip bitten ragged. She releases her hold on Wraith to bring a hand up to her face, wiping at her nose, hiccuping one last sob.

Wraith does not ask if she's okay. Instead, she merely brushes back her bangs with one hand, lays a cool hand against Natalie's forehead, and her eyes shutter in response. It takes time, for Natalie to collect herself, and a few false starts after that before she can speak again.

"I saw him again," she murmurs, pulling away to sit up and into a slouch, scrubbing at her face despondently. She feels so much older than she is. "Always, after that dream." Sometimes he stands next to her bed, incorporeal and casting no shadow. Other times he is facing the window, hands clasped behind his back. They are all shades, of course. The hallucinations of sleep before it finally fades from her mind, trapped wishes and dreams leaving her mind like ravens scattered by sound.

They are not new: she's had these sorts of dreams ever since she was a girl. 

For a long time, it was _maman_. Now it is him. 

It does not hurt any less than when she was small.

(Sometimes she feels like she is a ghost herself, an echo left behind. _Le spectre_, but if that is the case, at least she is a ghost--a _wraith--_ in good company. Wraith's haunting is a comfort.)

Natalie exhales wearily, steadying herself. "I often wish that I could stay sleeping forever. To never have to face the world again." Bitterness creeps up her veins, ugliness that corrodes her words like acid rain. Later, she will be embarrassed by it, this moment of weakness that has flayed her kindness from her bones. "To wish for such a thing, at my age._ Je suis **stupide**\--"_

"Hey," Wraith says, her raspy voice stern as she rolls over onto her side, hooking one arm around Natalie's hips with the suddenness of a viper's strike. She lays her cheek against Natalie's bare thigh, using it as a pillow. Her lips are pursed thin. "Stop that. You're _not_ stupid." 

Natalie scoffs, but tangles their fingers together all the same. Her grip is too tight, but Wraith doesn't wince. She's never once shied away from the ugly parts of her. The parts of her that do not fit neatly into her skin and smile. She shrugs weakly. "Foolish, then."

"Why?" Wraith raises her chin in defiance. She squeezes Natalie's hand back just as firmly, undeterred. "It's been less than a year, Nat. You're _allowed_ to miss him."

Tears prick at the corner of Natalie's eyes, and she does not wipe them away. "It's not that. _Il me manque-- _it means... it means 'I miss him'. But to translate it fully-- _truly_\-- it means that he is missing _from_ me. Like a hole in my chest, a a well that has no end." She's caught out by another sob, somehow by surprise. Her ribs hurt as much as her burning lungs, and all of her aches from exertion.

Wraith kisses the back of her hand and sits up to hunch beside her, never letting her go. Their shoulders brush, and a calloused thumb rubs against her skin to soothe her. She doesn't touch anyone else like this. She avoids contacts with others, even though her skin hunger before Natalie was ravenous and unmatched. But now, every movement is deliberate, thought out and considered. 

They've come so far together, and despite it all, Natalie has to smile, just a little. Navigating the landmines that are their grief and trauma is a dance of two steps forward and one step back, but it is one they do together. Wraith is not her other half, but her partner. Her _equal_. She owes it to them both to be honest. She's never explained the contents of her recurring dream before.

Wraith kisses her neck and waits, a dry brush, chaste.

"I never see papa _in _it," she says, wiggling her fingers in Wraith's grasp. "It is just me, alone, a fly trapped in amber. I never have to go back; to go back would mean that I must lose him all over again. I never have to go forward and live without him." Natalie turns her head to steal a gentle kiss, to knock their foreheads together. "I miss him, very dearly. I will miss him forever, like _maman_. But I must do the work to patch this hole. To step around it so that I might live."

Wraith smiles against her lips, the ghost of a touch before taking another, and then another. "There aren't any ever after endings," she breathes, "life goes on past them. I don't have the answers, yours or mine. But I'm here with you. Every step of the way."

"I know," Natalie says, and she does. Her heart is a cup overflowing, and she would much rather be suspended in it than defeat. Tomorrow is a new day; they will rise and stay in bed almost too long, until they are breathless and sun-warm. They will take their breakfast with Octavio and Ajay and Elliott, and suit up for another day, on the same team or otherwise. The world will move on, and Natalie will with it, a smile returned to her face. Grief held close to her chest, not forgotten, but not ruling her. The little things in life make her smile, and she will turn it to the skies of King's Canyon, to the arena she'd built with the greatest man she'd ever known.

Outside, the clouds part, and she smiles. "_Je t’aime jusqu’à la lune et le retour, ma chérie._" 

Wraith laughs, cheeks flushing, a woman deprived of love her whole life soaking it up like a budding tree does water, the roots of her tangling with hers. "Love you too, Nat," she murmurs, and she does.

She does.

**Author's Note:**

> listened a whole lot of [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdeGWJJur00) on repeat while writing this!
> 
> \--
> 
> my spanish may be mediocre, but my french is very much nonexistent. forgive the errors!
> 
> \--
> 
> Je suis stupide = i'm so stupid  
maman = mom  
non = no  
Je t’aime jusqu’à la lune et le retour = i love you to the moon and back


End file.
